RHYME PRIMING IN APHASIA - THE ROLE OF PHONOLOGY IN LEXICAL ACCESS

The present experiment was conducted to explore the facilitory effects of rhyme in lexical processing in brain-damaged individuals. Normal s ubjects and non-fluent and fluent aphasic subjects performed auditory lexical decision and rhyme judgement tasks, in which prime-target pair s were phonologically related (either identical or rhyming) or unrelat ed. Results revealed rhyme facilitation of lexical decisions to real-w ord targets for normal and non-fluent aphasic subjects; for fluent aph asic subjects, results were equivocal. In the rhyme judgement task, fa cilitory effects of rhyme were found for all three groups with real-wo rd targets. None of the groups showed clear rhyme facilitation effects with non-word targets in either task. Findings are discussed with ref erence to the role of phonology in lexical processing in normal and ap hasic populations. (C) 1994 Academic Press, Inc.